It sounds strange that an Emanuelle softcore sex film is being
covered here as a horror film but for anyone like myself who knows of the most
infamous of the Emmanuelle cash-ins,
when producers realised they could knock off one "m" from the name and
get away with having the title, it's appropriate because of the moments which
led to Emanuelle In America getting
this infamy. What's meant to be a softcore film meant to titillate, in the beautiful
Laura Gemser in the lead role and the
other women, maybe even some of the beefcake men in the cast, turns quickly
into the fictional cousin of the Italian mondo documentaries. Mondo films,
already part fiction with suspect fact, were a catalogue of both the grotesque
and the scintillating, between moments of humour and sex to actual death. Emanuelle In America, following the
titular Emanuelle (Gemser) as a journalist
photographer who sneaks undercover into the sordid lives of the rich and powerful
to uncover front page material, is a mondo film in tone from the various
scenarios it gets into, from a man who pays women to be his sexual harem to
older women going to a secret club to pay for sex. As this is helmed by Joe D'Amato, one of the more notorious
and lurid directors of the Italian genre boom of the seventies and eighties,
who could go from Anthropophagus (1980) to
zombie porn hybrids like Erotic Nights
of the Living Dead (1980), the film is even more willing to get grimy.

Strangely the film does live up
to its notoriety but is also incredibly naive and innocent at others points in
its view of sexuality; even when there's actual real sex involved between
actors, its strangely innocent at times with its interest in free love and
orgies compared to modern pornography. A lot of the film is incredibly dated,
blurring the line between being a film about a sexually liberated woman and
being misogynistic, Emanuelle only a fantasy for men who want a woman who wants
to have sex a lot but without the feminist emancipation behind women owning
their own sexuality and bodies. I will state flat out however that this is a
hell of a lot better in quality and morality than the original Emmanuelle film from 1974 starring Sylvia Kristel. In terms of the gender
politics, the blatantness of Italian genre films like this in cashing in on popular
films is the lesser of two evils than the incredibly problematic politics of
the original French film, where to be a free woman in her passions Emmanuelle
has to follow the orders of an older man and is even raped by his command by
others to liberate her. In terms of quality, the seventies aesthetic is shared
between them but the flares and funky soundtrack by Nico Fidenco is a lot better than the bland soft focus of the
original film or it ripping off King
Crimson in the soundtrack. Also Sylvia
Kristel is not a good Emmanuelle; she was far more beautiful and
interesting in Claude Chabrol's surreal
Alice, or the Last Escapade (1977) and
having her as a weak, childlike figure in the original's script is like
clipping the wings off as a character who could be more interesting if she took
to her desires like a dolphin to water. For all the gross, eyebrow raising
content I'll get to with Emanuelle In
America, LauraGemser is both unbelievably gorgeous and
more physically charismatic, something far more appropriate to the character
that she can even cope with a puritanical sociopath pointing a gun to her head
by caressing his crotch through his jeans and scaring him away through her
sexual charisma.

When things get strange is when
the tonal shifts come about. Most of the film is light hearted and ultimately
not as shocking as it would have been back in the seventies. Even the brief
moments of real sex just evoke when Tinto
Brass in softcore comedies like All
Ladies Do It (1992) did the same thing, sometimes with prosthetic members. In
fact moments in this, such as Emanuelle and her boyfriend in Venice having sex
next to an orchestra practicing in the next room, do evoke Brass. The issue with the film and why its notorious is to the more
shocking things added for extra spice. The first is excised from any British release
of the film, be it streamed or on DVD, involving a woman giving a horse a
friendly handshake. Not in the realms of the Kenneth Pinyan case documented in Zoo (2007) but something which could only come from the seventies,
a period of cinema that's actually becoming even more problematic for us in the
now-future to think about because, for every transgressive film that's
celebrated, there's works like this even in one scene which is now more
problematic to deal with in terms of historical retrospective. The other aspect
that's even more infamous about the film is fake but completely out-of-synch
with the generally light-hearted tone.

Just as you think the film's going
to be about cheesy orgies where actors lay writhing naked on each other, and
you see men woo older women dressed as Tarzan and Zorro, there's the snuff film
subplot. Set up at the older women's club and becoming the finale narrative
pull, it's not depicted in a cheesy titillating way, with bright orange blood
and rubber torture devices, but completely straight as snippets of scenes from
a torture horror film, a completely different film entirely accidentally
spliced in at first until it becomes a plot point. In the realm of this type of
Italian genre cinema, it's bizarre and
tasteless even by the industry's standards, knocking one off the rails of how
to deal with the movie. How can it still be a softcore sex film if it's going
to be intentionally grim with the snuff film content? The silly and morbid gets
confused and, when the film ends back with the comedy with Emanuelle amongst a
jungle tribe, it's like being chewed up and spat out. Only if the film was
trying to be like Japanese ero-guro would it make sense to a modern viewer's
mind and even then, that's in the context of knowing there were films like this
from countries like Italy and Japan that did the same thing but weren't
necessarily going for the deliberately provocative. It was worth covering as a
horror film from this because this kind of disarming of the viewer, even a
mistake here, is the kind of thing many creators always wanted for their films
but suddenly sucker punches you viewing Emanuelle
In America. Even when you're openly aware it was there like I was its like
being punched in the stomach.

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"I could go on for hours with more examples. The list is endless. You probably never gave it a thought, but all great films, without exception, contain an important element of no reason. And you know why? Because life itself is filled with no reason." - Rubber (2010)

About Me

I am 28 years old and hail from England. For the last few years I have been a growing fan of cinema and have decided to take the next step into blogging about it and any other tangents that about the things I'm interested in I get onto.